Manchester City special: Are youngsters paying price for Blues success?

Adding Robin van Persie to the star-studded Manchester City side is appealing - but at what cost to the Blues youngsters?

Van Persie, Aguero, Tevez, Balotelli, Silva, Nasri, Yaya. It is almost poetry, and the prospect of Manchester City unleashing such an artistic attacking force on the Premier League, and the Champions League, has Blues drooling at the mouth.

Of course, there are more than a few hurdles to clear before City can start seriously thinking about adding the Dutch striker to their galaxy of stars.

No-one is yet entirely sure whether Robin van Persie himself wants to stay in England, or seek a new life in Spain or Italy, whether he is intent on winning a Premier League medal after eight years without at Arsenal.

And City will not be signing anyone unless they can off-load Emmanuel Adebayor, Roque Santa Cruz and possibly Edin Dzeko to off-set some of the fee and make room on the wage bill.

But if they do pull off yet another transfer coup and bag the Premier League Golden Boot winner, the Blues will take some stopping next season.

No doubt the critics will be out in force, whining about City buying the title and cherry-­picking the best players – usually critics whose own clubs have spent the past 20 years buying the title and cherry-picking other people’s players.

Arsenal fans getting affronted by the possibility of City snapping up another of their players should ask Southampton fans how THEY feel about having Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain taken off their hands.

That is the problem in the Greedy League fish tank – there is always a bigger, meaner fish lurking in the weeds.

City’s accelerated evolution, fed by the oil millions of Sheikh Mansour, has shocked English football, but the owners recognised that they would need huge investment in a relatively short space of time just to propel the club to the same level as United and Chelsea.

The other side of that coin is that City’s proud tradition of developing their own players has been put on a back-burner, and the truth of that was brought home this week by the words of Vladimir Weiss as he prepared to return for pre-season training.

The Slovakian star of City’s 2008 FA Youth Cup-winning team looks set to leave, frustrated by the lack of first-team opportunity and needing, at the age of 22, to get his career moving.

Weiss was the winger who caught the eye in the 2008 final win over Chelsea, and who went on to represent his country at the last World Cup, even as he was finding it tough to find an opening into Roberto Mancini’s first-team squad.

After spending most of the last three seasons on loan – at Bolton, Rangers and Espanyol – Weiss returned to training at Carrington this week, indicating his future appears to lie elsewhere.

“After the start of the pre-season preparation I want to wait for a week or two to see how the situation develops,” he said. “At the moment I can already tell you that I have four specific offers. One from England, one from Italy and two from Spain.

“It is likely to be problematic with finances as it is not easy to leave City. I have also been in touch with German clubs and there is a rumoured interest from Russia and Turkey.

“But I’m not looking in that direction though because as long as I have offers from the top leagues – Spanish, English, Italian and German – I will be interested in those.”

If Weiss goes, it means that there will be just three of the players who played in the two legs of the 2008 final still at the club – Dedryck Boyata, Abdi Ibrahim and Ryan McGivern – and none of them appears to be remotely in with a chance of a first-team spot this season.

The problem has been that while you can improve your first team almost instantaneously by paying out money, the investment in the academy is more of a slow-burning thing. City may not get the full benefits of the money they are spending on the Etihad Campus development for another 10 years.

They aim to be more like Barcelona but, for the moment, have to be more like Real Madrid. The vision is that by 2022 the Blues will be producing their own superstars, who will graduate from the furthest pitches of the academy, getting closer to the Etihad Stadium as they progress through the ranks, in a symbolic progression.

Part of Mancini’s brief when he was given the City job in December 2009 was to try to get the conveyor belt from Platt Lane to the stadium working again, as Mark Hughes had handed out one debut in 18 months – ironically, to Weiss.

Mancini, who himself became a Serie A regular as a 16-year-old, dished out 11 debuts to players aged 21 or under in his first 18 months, to express his willingness to ensure the academy kids have an incentive, and to reinforce his own belief in allowing youth its head.

Greg Cunningham yesterday became the third of those debutants to leave the club, when he signed for Bristol City – Javan Vidal and Chris Chantler both left last season.

With so much at stake last season, and a much bigger first team squad to keep happy, the rate of first-team opportunities slowed significantly. The only kids given their chance were Karim Rekik and Luca Scapuzzi in the Carling Cup third round tie against Birmingham, and Denis Suarez in the following round at Wolves.

Mancini is likely to harden his attitude to the academy. He has already hinted that the players coming through have to be good enough – and prepared well enough – to make a challenge for a first-team place, and has expressed his belief that at the moment that is not the case.

Suarez, who was signed for an initial fee of £850,000 in May 2011, picked up the club’s Young Player of the Year award for last season but he still appears to have a phalanx of international stars between him and a first-team spot.

It is a harsh truth but, in the rarefied atmosphere in which City now operate, and with stars like van Persie arriving on a regular basis, the kids have to be the very best, or they just won’t make it at the Etihad.

How can City get more Academy players through to the first team? Have your say.

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